


The Duty of a Night

by misslonelyhearts



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-06
Updated: 2012-03-19
Packaged: 2017-10-27 00:04:34
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/misslonelyhearts/pseuds/misslonelyhearts
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the eve of his first day assigned to the Ferelden Circle, his first day as a true Templar, Cullen finds himself lost. . . in more ways than one.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> There is a scant bit of implied non-con from Cullen's youth.

Cullen is lost.  Cullen is lost, and he’s late.  And that’s the worst part.  If he’d started out earlier, like the sisters begged him, he’d be. . .well, he’d still be lost, but he wouldn’t be late for his first day.  He’s kept the tower on his right, followed the blighted path until it swept down toward the lake, and promptly got himself lost among the tall trees.  He frowns and scrapes his fingers across the prickle of a new beard that wasn’t there this morning.  Elves had a nasty word for humans who couldn’t find their way in the woods.  He tries, and fails, not to think of the word.

Splashing.  The brilliant, tell-tale sound of splashing snaps Cullen out of his fog of self-pity.  He follows the sound like a dog to a whistle, slapping through sap laden branches, until he finally slides out onto the wet shale at the edge of Lake Calenhad.  The young Templar thinks it’s not a moment too soon, either.  The sun is plunging behind the hills as if making Cullen look bad is its only purpose in the world. 

He sees two utterly dismaying things when his eyes travel down from the violet edge of the horizon.  First is the dock.  The dock is on the opposite end of the lake.  Balls to that.  He wants to shout and pitch rocks into the water and throw up his hands.  The second thing is a man who appears to be drowning just a little ways offshore from where Cullen burst out of the trees.  Rather, the man appears to be flailing around in what looks like three feet of water.

“Of course.”  Cullen mutters, dropping his pack.  His new armor squeals in protest as the bag tumbles the rest of the way down to the shore, and he toes off his boots.  He can swim, but he won’t have to.  The man splashing about, sucking air for all he’s worth, is clearly an idiot.  And everyone has a word for that, he thinks, and smirks a little before sloshing into the frigid water.

Before he can hook his arms under the man’s shoulders, Cullen is dragged to his knees.  They collide, and the lake rushes up between them, soaking him from sack to sternum.  Hands grope his arms, climbing him like a frightened kitten and it’s all he can do not to tip over.  He’s had enough of this.  Cullen grits his teeth, jaw jumping, and hauls the scrabbling, trembling creature from the lake.  Two steps, three, and they’re clear.  His muscles decide to call it a day, and he drops the man unceremoniously.  He tries not to enjoy the heavy grunt and thump as the spent body hits the shale.  But this isn’t the kind of day where Cullen can simply nod and walk away.  Not after getting lost.  Not after being hours and hours late for his first day in the Circle.  He slips on the slick, black rock and goes down hard next to the half-naked man, scraping his palms and elbows to a brilliant, red pulp.

“Perfect.”  He moans, seeing stars.  But these are real stars, the first ones of the evening poking through the dusk sky.  He squeezes his eyes shut and remembers that Templars are strong, patient, and don’t allow themselves the luxury of whining over a bruised backside.

Wet coughing erupts beside him.  In the waning light, Cullen turns and sees that the man is barely younger than he.  What might have been honey colored hair has been roughly hacked away and hangs like an overused mop around the graceful jaw and straight nose. Tall and broad, but too slim for his build.  Hunger, he thinks, the kind of prolonged malnutrition that will never really leave a body.  And he can only tell this much because there is no shirt to speak of, and barely a whisper of sackcloth, tied with twine, for breeches.  When his eyes track upwards again, not overlooking the way that nothing bit of clothing clings wetly to . . .he finds amber eyes open and staring at him. 

“Thank you.  I would have drowned.”  The man coughs again and Cullen watches, incredulous, as he puts a hand up to cover it.  As if they were standing at court.  There are flakes of shale and broken shells stuck to the edge of his palm and along his forearm. 

Cullen stares at him.  The voice is a little broken, too, but underneath the garble of lake water there’s a sound like velvet.  He comes back to himself, shivering.  In the middle of the lake, the Tower is monolithic.  Though there is no reason to think it, Cullen looks at the black shape rising out of the water and wonders if what waits for him inside isn’t more than he can reasonably handle. 

The sun has gone ahead and fucked off behind the toothy silhouette of Calenhad’s forest.  No good deed, he thinks to himself, and dusts the broken bits of shell from his own hands.  Cullen mutters unkindly, “You wouldn’t have drowned.”  And then feels like a perfect ass when he sees how weakly the man nods his chin, how the corner of his mouth turns up in a wan smirk.  “Look, are you okay?  Can you. . .?”  He’s gotten to his feet and he holds his arm out, stifling the urge to grouse about the sopping drag of his wool socks and the ache of his tailbone.  The man takes Cullen’s arm and allows himself to be pulled to his bare feet. 

“I’m right as rain.  Rain is wet, after all.” 

In spite of himself, of his thundercloud mood, Cullen smiles.

“You would have been fine, really, but I’m happy to help.”

“No, I’m pretty sure I would have died.”

The man gives the young Templar a soft smile and . . .was that a wink?  But he’s already turned to the water, stepping delicately over the treacherous shale.  Cullen watches as the man pulls on a piece of twine leading from a knot around his ankle . . .had he noticed that when dragging him out? . . . and disappearing into the lake.  The craggy length of jute rises out of the water as he tugs. 

But it’s not what lies at the end of the rope that holds Cullen’s eyes.  Almost as soon as he’s seen the tether it’s forgotten.  It’ll wait or it won’t as the Mother used to say.  The only thing he can look at are the angry welts streaking across the man’s back.  There are shells, and some dirt and leaves stuck to him there, too, stippling the pale canvas of skin.  But the marks.  These are bright, all two dozen of them.  New and shiny as feast-day ribbons, and each one travels in a shouting, crimson arc from shoulder to waist.  Cullen’s been strapped before.  The sting of a belt or a willow branch, wielded by someone impossibly huge and angry, are not things a child forgets. 

But this is a man.  The flayed skin speaks of something impossibly corrupt.  And Maker help a man forget a thing like that. 

His back is still turned, long arms still tugging at the twine and heaving something out of the water, and Cullen suddenly shifts to see the Tower just ahead.  It’s looming in the blurry distance, just over one raw, striped shoulder.  He feels something darker and more inevitable than the encroaching night slide over his heart.  Though he’s the one who still has his clothes, Cullen shivers.

“There, see?”  The man gives a final yank at his jute tether and a monstrous bramble of sunken deadwood slumps onto the bank. “I thought it would float the whole time.  But it got dragged under and caught on this.  There wasn’t time to untie it, and I didn’t have a blade to cut the rope.”  He kneels to tease apart the slimy, knotted wood, and Cullen can see how the bones of his spine are starting to show between those gashes across his back.  But more urgent than this is the fact that a mage’s staff appears between his hands.  Ironwood or red steel, in the dark it’s hard to tell, with a blackened crystal caged by wicked-looking spikes at one end.  “It might as well have been an anchor.  Blighted thing.”

“Wait.”

“I know.  It wouldn’t be my choice.  Mine was perfect.  It was so simple, with a cunning blade at one end and a bit of carving at the other.  I miss it.”  He plunks the staff’s blunt end against the cracked shale and leans on it.  Cullen shakes his head, as if it will filter out the wah-wah noise that’s making his heart thump. 

“You’re a mage?”

“I’m Anders.”  He smiles again, a little more velvet seeping in, and Cullen almost winces at that gesture.  The exhausted thing that drags itself across lips that he’s sure were lush once upon a time.

Nothing makes sense.  But that is not how Cullen will think of it later.  Later, he will tell himself that he knew all along.  That he knew just what to do and waited for just the right moment.  And for a few minutes every day he will believe it.  But really nothing fit the way his brain wanted it to.  The man. . .Anders. . .slides a wet palm against the staff, still watching Cullen, and starts picking apart the knot where it’s tethered.  When he speaks again, his voice has lost some percentage of its earlier fragility and the shadowed, amber eyes are a little keener.  “So, what now?  Don’t let me keep you from. . .whatever you were doing out in the woods.”


	2. Two

“Did you escape?”  Balls, but he was a dull twit sometimes.  Cullen considers the knife, hidden in its diminutive sheath at the small of his back, and how many times he begged the sisters to teach him just a little _more_ about these basic spells.  And of course, he wishes there were lyrium, enough to wash the next few minutes away.

“Maker no!  This is part of an exercise to, ehm, keep the Templars sharp.”   If he were to close his eyes and let Anders’ voice crawl around in the dark, he might be convinced.  Cullen has certainly held his tongue and followed lesser charmers through worse lies.  But the mage’s back, with its lattice of pain, lights up the dim recesses of his brain like a signal fire.  When Anders leans close, clapping a firm hand on the new recruit’s shoulder, Cullen blinks at him, silent, jaw writhing beneath his stubble.

“Let me tell you, they’ll be so happy you kept one of their finest training devices from drowning himself like a drunken dwarf.”

Maybe it’s the word ‘training’ that does it, but Cullen is suddenly, viscously aware that he’s not some trembling, green kid in the chantry orphanage any longer. He hasn’t been that in a dog’s age.  Not since training. There are no snarling fellow cast-offs to fight through. No weak pleas for more food or less hurt.  And the hand on his shoulder doesn’t have to make him feel used.

“If you come quietly I will request leniency on your behalf.”  The voice is a Templar’s voice, and he thinks, a little ruefully, that he has finally started his first day.

Anders lets his smile hang lower, and Cullen feels the palm on his shoulder crackle.  There is power, and it beckons a response.

“The Circle doesn’t know that word.”

“All the same.  You’re going back, and I’m going to take you.”  Pictures of important things gallop behind his eyes, showing him exactly how to pull his long sword free from his pack, how many vials of lyrium he has in his belt (if they haven’t been ruined by lake water), how many spells before he’s tapped . . .how many loops to bind a wrist.

“Armed with what?  Your sparkling wit?”  When Anders laughs, nervous and thrilled all at once, it sounds like an invitation to dance.  The new recruit lifts his chin.  They stop pretending not to know the steps.

Cullen can see everything, hear everything, as time whistles past.  The way the mage’s pale fingers flutter and grip the staff.  How his knees unlock, and the hum of the Fade gathering in his hands. 

It begins when Anders tips the staff forward, white light arcing from it like the glowing ribbons of a maypole.  Cullen dodges, blood on fire now, and throws himself backwards into a roll.  His pack is there, somewhere, imitating a rock or a tree stump on the gloomy shore.  But he doesn’t have time to find it right away, not with Anders bearing down, all snapping lighting and ghostly skin.

“Who are you to interfere?  You could have simply walked away.”  Cullen hears the discord there.  If-onlys and what-ifs crowd around Anders and he seems to wait, divided by the chance to flee and the temptation to strike.  It’s a feeling they share whether Cullen wants to admit it or not, even as he crawls backward and his scrabbling hand finds familiar leather straps.  The mage builds a storm in his palm.  The Templar wrenches his blade, scabbard and all, from the pack. 

It’s too late, he thinks, watching the lighting lash out at him, and closes his eyes to focus on throwing up a fortress around himself.  Which, blessedly, works.  The curse flows over him, around him, and dies.  Cullen shakes behind its vibration, feeling the delicious ebb of the lyrium as it drags through his skin.  He snaps to his feet and his sword shimmies out of the scabbard.  Anders blinks.

“You’re a bloody _Templar_?”  There is an exasperated edge to him now, and it transforms the prettier angles of his face into something savage.

“I’m Cullen.  And yes, that too.”  The blade is meant for one hand, but Cullen slinks back, higher on the shore, and needs to grip it with both hands.  His fortress is fading and he’s seeing the chessboard for what it is.  Anders is younger, nearly naked and half-starved.  But the mage is not weak.  Not by a mile.  The thing is, though, Cullen has a spine made of pure steel.  The sisters saw it every time he came to them with a black eye, or returned a purloined trinket stolen by one of the others.  It has painted a target on him, gotten him laid, and made him, at turns, both admired and reviled.  His spells are inferior and he doesn’t have the experience he needs, but he has a strength that he’s pretty sure this _Anders_ won’t see coming.  “Stop now and come quietly.  This is your last warning.”

“Oh, love, I’ll never stop.  So rattle your toy and ask the Maker for your blessing and get on with it.”  White teeth flash at him, and amber eyes grow hot.  And Cullen hates how much he craves this part.  The Maker will understand, he hopes, how the grind of flesh, and the bliss of being matched in battle, mean more to him, to his very body, than rhymes and articulate voices.

He swings wide.  Anders blocks, twirling the heavy length of the staff.  So, it’s steel, he thinks grimly, and sees sparks kissing in the dark place where their weapons meet. Cullen pulls on his lyrium like a thread, and he tries to coax it into a shape.  As the mage pushes his sword away, he wants Silence, but comes up with fuck all.  Frustrated, grunting, Cullen lunges again.  It’s not fair how quick Anders is, how lithe.  As they dance, Anders leads, and it makes the swordsman crazy.  He dodges a blast of fiercely cold wind, feeling the very tips of his hair turn crisp with ice.  As usual, he’s trying too many things at once, breaking each rule as it flutters up from his muscles. 

Cullen attempts Silence again when he should be striking with his pommel, and Anders grins, feral in the moonlight.  The staff cuts the air with a brisk whine and collides with Cullen’s ribs.  It sounds like failure, and he feels it before it connects.  The Templar growls, and in his anger forgets to step lightly around the loose shale.  He goes down, and the spell within him is lost. Anders taps the ground, and before he can cry out with the injustice of this sodding day, Cullen is paralyzed. 

Only the moon and stars are witness to this shame. But they don’t offer him pity any more than they do judgment.  Small favors, he thinks, and lays on the shore as frozen as the stones around him.  He can’t see the glyph flowing in a lazy circle, but he can see its haze in his periphery.  The mage tosses his sword into the lake and picks up Cullen’s pack.  His fury is not paralyzed, though, and it freely chases down his nerves with a tantalizing burst.  He can do nothing about it for the moment, this need to repay Anders in kind, so the Templar’s mind upends the chessboard and starts a new game.  One he can win.

“Don’t feel bad.  I just wanted it more.  You can’t know how . . .if you only knew what it was like in there, maybe.”  As he speaks, Anders glances back at the tower.  He wrestles his arms into Cullen’s spare wool jerkin, and hastily pulls on the only nice trousers he’s ever had.  Everything fits the tall mage about as well as a sack of turnips. He would love to blink, at least, and hide some part of himself from this moment.  But the glyph twirls, and the magic stays, and the Templar fails at trying not to feel as small and pointless as he does.  He’s not even tense.  Cullen is simply nothing, wrapped around a glowing ember of rage. The mage kneels over him, a more reluctant victor Cullen has never seen.  “Sod it.  You’ll be fine, right?  Relax, enjoy the view, and try to forget you ever saw me.”

After a smile like a crack of lightning, the face moves away, replaced by glittering stars.  He hears his boots slide over the feet of their new owner, and the crunch of stone and pine needles under quick, receding footsteps.  But Cullen isn’t allowed to be alone with his misery.  Like always, nothing is ever truly _his_.  Not even dignity.  This is how it feels when Anders lurches back towards him, long legs eating up the bank and bringing him down to Cullen’s side again.

“Listen, I want you to know that I appreciate what you did.  I can’t just leave you like this without making you see that we’re not. . .not all of us want to burn the world down.”  What he sees gazing down at him is just a mage.  It’s what Cullen will say to himself after prayers each day after this.  Just a mage and nothing more.  He will forget that Anders puts a hand to the side of his face, and turns his head so they can see each other.  Really see.  “I’m sorry.”

Eventually, the taste of Anders will drop away from the Templar’s mind, too.  In a lifetime there are only so many kisses to hold onto.  But, when the mage descends on him, honey eyes and warm lips, Cullen is sure that this will never go away.  In that moment he is thirteen and struggling, he is eighteen and willing . . .he is a Templar and his anguish burns him alive, trapped inside his own body.  Anders can kiss him, move his mouth over Cullen and press the man’s lips apart, but he can’t know what it means.  Or maybe he does.  And Cullen tastes hope and need where there has only ever been command after command. He tastes the brackish lake, and the tang of the magic as it rockets from tongue to tongue. 

Like in battle, Cullen sees everything.  He can take it all in through is skin and his nose and his ears.  And, because that’s all he can do as the kiss deepens, immobile and thrumming under his skin, he treats it like a defense and a weapon in one.  He lets the blackwater smell of the mage’s hair surround him.  A thumb presses his cheekbone. Anders is everywhere, with a hand on his chest and a mouth that is done with civility in a way that makes Cullen wish he could groan and pull as vividly as the pictures in his head beg him to.  Despite paralysis, he notes the way his cock jumps with nothing less than unholy _want_.

And, Maker take him, he wants.

Above this, though, the Templar’s body begins to gather power from Anders, feeding itself from something primal, and makes a brilliant reserve for the spells Cullen is happy to discover he hasn’t forgotten after all.


	3. Three

He doesn’t have time to think of how parts of him are warm, bloody _hot_ , while the rest of him shivers.  There is only time for the lips on his, and constructing the moments that haven’t happened yet; the kiss, the tongue, the heat. . . all necessary pieces of a battle sliding over the chessboard toward what he wants.  He feels the hand on his chest, and how the mage’s fingers touch the barest inch of flesh and hair above the gaping neck of his shirt.  He feels the muscles of his lips responding, and wonders if he’ll ever have a measure of desire that doesn’t leave him achingly hard and bereft all at once.  His tribute to the Chantry has been paid by his very body.  Yes, in service . . .but also, in the pangs of youth, by frantic petting in a forgotten wardrobe, in shallow thrusts and knuckles dusted with gray hair, in scratches laid over freckled cheeks.  The paralysis weakens, breaks down along the path of what little lyrium he has left.  Cullen decides what he wants in remuneration, and slides his tongue against the one in his mouth.

Anders makes a startled sound, and tries to break the urgent press of his lips.  But the Templar is there, barely moving but finding his voice again, and his tongue catches the mage’s attention.  It’s a small thing, but it allows them to stay connected, and for Cullen to think of the warm place where Anders’ fingers touch him, the spot over his heart, as the sole extension of his power.  Lyrium sings between them, faint but surprising in the dark, and Cullen pushes Cleanse with everything he has.

The effect is immediate.  What was stilled by paralysis doesn’t roar to life, exactly, but the recruit finds his muscles full of weight and color again.  His hands and his thighs uncoil.  Cullen shoves upward, reveling in the way the small stones break open his scraped elbows again, and he throws himself on top of the mage.  The quiet of the shoreline breaks apart, echoing with the huff and grunt of their struggle and the twang of the mage’s staff as it bounces away in the dark.  Anders lands squarely on his back, pinned by the larger body.  For a moment they are turtles, joined at the belly, and neither can gain purchase enough to complete a flip or a punch.  It doesn’t matter, though because their hands cease to function as weapons in the space between blows, and grapple instead with shoulders and fingers and faces in a decidedly un-brutal way.  Cullen is heavy and strong in all the places that privation has sapped the fullness from Anders.  If it can be nothing else, he thinks, his body will always be the bulwark or the battering ram.

He grinds against wool and flesh, his clothes on another man, and Cullen dimly acknowledges how hard he’s grown despite the weight of his duty.  So, it is painfully unclear just how he might bring himself to drag this mage back to the Circle.  Not simply because Anders _was_ kissing him, and the threat of magic still lingers, but because they somehow agree not to stop just because the fight has resumed on fairer ground. 

What he sees is the flayed skin striping his back, and the cagey smile betraying no pain . . .pain he surely endures now, with Cullen pasting him against the jagged shale like a ruddy ox.




“Here, I’m. . . sorry,” he stammers.  In a fluid motion he has no reason to expect of his bulk, Cullen grips Anders by the shoulders and hauls them both to the side, and over.  The mage catches himself, wasting none of the momentum, and seats the Templar as if it’s the most natural thing in the world.  As if they weren’t combatants at all, but proper lovers.  Anders completes the farce by snatching his wrists, a crackle of magic teasing the night air, and grinding forward so they both groan.  Cullen turns his face, ceding his paltry portion of wisdom to the ache in his groin.  Proper _anything_ is beyond him.  What he sees, when he lets himself look again, is the wild halo of Anders’ hair in the moonlight, and an expression of confusion so familiar he wants to laugh.  The mage shakes his head.

“Why? You had the advantage.  I should be bound, and shuffling back to the tower by now.”

“Does it matter?”  It isn’t bitterness he tastes on the blade of his own voice, but something closer to seduction.  Cullen bucks, sending Anders forward into his face, planting their hands in the cold stones.  “Fight or don’t.”

The mage swallows, and Cullen wants to see his eyes again.  If only to know that the hunger licking from those hips is among the tricks any cornered animal would use in its defense.  Or if, on a cocked up day like this, he might have found a true and simple thing.  He winces at his need.  Darkness can be tricky.  It blesses them with the traces of anonymity, but it steals any hope of understanding.  Soon enough he has his answer in the mouth that covers his again, and a steady rocking that brings them both careening out of obscurity.


	4. Chapter 4

Anders doesn’t release his wrists at first, fear still breathing alongside the rougher points of pleasure where they rub together.  That’s fine with Cullen, the recruit doesn’t require grip.  He plants his bare feet in the rocks and sand, pushes himself to meet the mage’s rolling hips, and feels every wretched ache along his cock where it’s trapped.  They don’t snarl at one another, teeth hidden behind the greater need of lips, and Anders makes no moans into Cullen’s mouth when they kiss.  Not like the ones the Templar himself can hear, and maybe they’re real or half-remembered, but they stick like honey to his throat.

His trousers jerk open, unkind fingers digging him out, and Cullen whimpers when Anders takes them both, squeezing too hard too fast, in one hand.

“Maker’s breath.”  He wheezes, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes where they grind broken shell and sand into his skin.  A spark catches in the gloom of his closed eyes, and Cullen looks down to find the mage applying a cantrip, then they’re slick with foul-smelling grease and Anders catches him watching.

“Sorry for the mess.” He doesn’t smile, really, seeming more than a little triumphant as he arches into the first strokes, eyes never leaving Cullen’s.  The Templar pulls at him, shucking Anders forward and back in a wave of belly skin and wet clothing.  It’s horrifyingly perfect.  Cullen slides his hand, middle finger leading, past the waistband sagging around the mage’s ass.  And he presses with every backthrust for no reason he wants to remember.

Anders’s voice breaks into a series of shuddering cries, forehead dropping to Cullen’s chest, and it blocks the view but not the feel.  The extraordinary feel.  Of his blighted cock pressed and sliding against the mage’s, and of the way he’ll always want it this way, deserve it this way.  Cullen fists a hand into the wild, wet hair, holding Anders taut to his chest, fingers kneading in the cleft of the mage’s ass.

They grunt like kids with bigger hands than brains.  _Balls_ , Cullen stares at the jumping stars, _Maker, please just … come, let me go.  Let me._   Anders drags his fist over mismatched cocks, from root to reddened tip, elbows jutting.  Cullen topples him then, not entirely sure why, only that control is a shifting thing he’s going to have to learn to take if he wants to be more than a tin man in a skirt.  Rattling in his mind, like the pebbles under them, are his job and his training, and the way the mage had beaten him so thoroughly.  He needs an order.  Strike or block.  Fuck or yield.  Anders can’t give orders, not the ones that speak as loud as those, but Cullen’s followed them his whole life, and draws them up as necessary.

“Wh…?” The mage takes Cullen’s weight, half sideways on the shore, submitting to surprise and the sudden pressure of the Templar’s hands replacing his.  The grease slips under his new calluses, and Cullen pushes an arm beneath bony shoulders, gripping for control as he ruts for them both. It’s so different for Cullen, heady, thumb rolling into the space between cocks, and they suck air as much as skin between the jerk of uneven arms.  Anders bites him, somewhere along the cord connecting neck to shoulder, and comes with a muffled cry.  And though the recruit remembers what that’s like, how deeply that blighted silence can run in their differing corridors, it doesn’t soften any part of his palm or the smash of his muscle against the lost hips beneath.  When he’s good and raw, Cullen holds the clinging Anders very still and comes in short, brutal strokes.

They lay uncomfortably slack on the shore, wet clothes more dingy for the grease, and scraped legs going cold on the broken shale.  Anders lets his arms drop from Cullen’s body, and then he hisses suddenly as if bitten.

“Andraste’s tits!  What in…?”

Cullen sits up, watching the mage nurse his hand, sucking.  And there, in the rocky space where the Templar’s back had been tenderized like meat under the weight of their stupidity, lays the dagger he’s always kept for last resort.

“Shit.  Don’t do that.”  In a fit of stilted concern, he yanks the hand from Anders’s lips and remembers, at the same time, what had happened as the sun set around them.  Cocked-up day or not, Cullen’s not lost any more, and he remembers the comfort of the steps he’s sworn to take.  The tower looms, the borrowed staff is somewhere in the dark, and his new sword is in the rotted lake. The fog, the heat, of this unlikely moment lifts away.  Cullen sees the battle again, heart thudding again, his ferocity restored in the promise of victory.  _Magebane_.  _Thank the Maker_.

“I feel like.  Oh, I’m going to be sick.”  Anders wrenches his trousers up, Cullen’s trousers still too big and wrong, and lifts onto his knees.  As the mage lurches to his feet, the Templar jumps up himself, eyes scanning for his pack, everything else from his cock to his lips forgotten under the battle-drum in his head.

The sound of retching doesn’t stop him.

There’s lyrium in his pack, and Cullen finds it as easily a hound bearing down on his master’s target.  His lips clasp the vial before Anders can stand up again, spells and prayers whispering in the burn that he swallows.  From the corner of his eye, Cullen spies Anders reeling and coming to his own realizations.  He tosses the empty bottle and squares himself.

The young mage clutches his stomach, backing down the shoreline in Cullen’s heavy boots. “I won’t go back.”

“Yes, you will.” Replies the Templar, feeling the word as much as the lyrium raging in place of armor.  “Anders …mage.  You will return to the Circle, under my protection, to be judged by the First Enchanter and the Knight Com-”

“Sod your duty.  Are you that thick? How can you not see what it means?”  Anders swings his head, still seeking the staff, hands held out less in supplication than in the furious search for dampened powers.  They fizzle like pitiful glowflies from his palms, and Anders whispers. “You can’t.”

Cullen shudders. He remembers the trace of the mage’s thumb on his jaw. _Not all of us want to burn the world down_.  But they would.  No price is too high for the desperate.  Who wouldn’t burn the hands that beat them if they had all that power?  With his eyes briefly closed, the Templar tries to think of something other than a fantastical version of himself, not yet fully grown, with the command of fire in his fingers … to scorch a kind of retribution into flesh.  Cullen looks across at the mage, Anders’s panic visible even in the dark.  The recruit had spent his paralyzed moments, both now and then, dreaming of that cleansing fire, willing it. “The Maker knows your heart.” He mutters, and the bitterness of it stretches around his chest.

“Don’t.” The voice across the small expanse of shale is still strong, if fearful, and Anders doesn’t drop his chin or his hands. “Don’t Silence me.”

They breathe together, apart, and Cullen _does_ manage tosilence so much all at once.  He tamps down the smell of the lake in the mage’s hair, and the lips taking his tenderly at first.  These, he burns away.  The hollow ache in his balls, and Anders straddling him; both gone in a whirl of blue flame in his mind.  There’s only the Chant, and the pure, sickly image of flogged skin to carry Cullen through the next few moments.

“Come quietly and I won’t.” Cullen advances, taking his steps more carefully on the moonlit stones.  Because, everything looks slippery now.

“No.”

The shore crackles with paltry magic that fails to ignite, Anders curses and twists to run, and Cullen bolts for him in bare feet with his open trousers drooping at his hips.  They make it to the treeline.  But the mage makes choked, heaving sounds under the deepening poison, and the bootlaces he’s neglected to fasten turn Anders into a tumbling acrobat crashing through pine branches.  When he falls, the Templar pounces.

“NO! Maker, please NO!”  Anders screeches, voice splitting to a hoarse cry as Cullen snatches the clawing hands, crossing them tightly over his chest, and pins the mage with all his weight.  Electricity, faded but buzzing, travels the skin where he holds Anders down, and the magebane does what it should.  

This is a mage, just a mage, and not a terrified man.  And certainly not an orphan covered in filth and freckles and old bruises.  It’s not a man, or a cock, or a fist.  It’s his duty.  Cullen _believes_ that how it differs from the dull pain of those things is …exalted.  The recruit closes off the sight of it, the strong cheeks and furious eyes below him too perfect in their reflection.  The Chant comes in spurts for Cullen’s addled mind, as he recalls it between heartbeats, and he Silences Anders with a whisper and a pulse of lyrium bridging their bodies.  _No, ‘the mage_ ,’ he thinks, and that’s how it will be now that all the buggered rest of it has burned away.

He pulls the mage to his feet, gently, and propels him back over needles and stones to the quiet bank.  No lips, no ache, and no uncertainty blind him now.  Though, he thinks, he’ll never fully be rid of this day.  But, who forgets the foibles of their ‘firsts’?  First steps, and first tastes, and the missteps of a first day’s work.  When they reach his ransacked satchel, Cullen has the mage kneel, hand firm on his neck, and fashions a wrist-binding from the cord of his pack.  The skin under his fingers is cold. 

They make the trek in the dark, two bodies moving the long way ‘round the lake.  Cullen keeps a hand on the bound wrists drooping low at the mage’s back, where he tries and fails to avoid the slip of skin from hip to hip, exposed by the ill-fitting trousers. 

“I don’t suppose I could bribe you?” The mage croaks at last, when they find the wagon-worn path and both can see the dock.  It’s shrouded in mist, the Inn and everything, but a Templar stands at the ready beside a smallish boat.  Cullen pulls a breath, relief making him flush.

“No.” He answers quietly.  But his eyes travel the choppy hair, down across shoulders that don’t slump, and settle on the boots he’s let the mage keep for now. “You’ve got nothing to bargain with, in any case.”

“Don’t I?” The mage’s voice cracks, dark and reaching, but his chin never dips low. “You’re not a complete idiot.  Surely you can think of something.”

The sound of it, how it isn’t teasing or threatening or anything but desperate, is something Cullen can’t help but remember.  He shakes his head, whether the mage can see it or not.  Even as they near the dock, and his prisoner takes each step instinctively slower, the recruit rolls that voice around in the pit of his stomach.  Bloody waste of a fighter, in the end, he thinks.  The mage that was Anders looks back at him, the moon making blue-black shadows across those pained eyes, and Cullen feels himself flinch even though he doesn’t show it.

Later, he will mark it as the moment he promises the Maker to think of his charges as pitiful creatures, degraded by demons.  He’ll do this because he can’t do otherwise, and because it’s an unjust symmetry in his life that he’s finally built the strength to shed.  And no one can take what he’s earned.  The wrists, bound and suddenly tense under his fingertips, are still cold.

Cullen’s voice barks out to the Templar on the dock, and he pushes the mage toward the boat, a few steps closer to the end of his first day.


End file.
